The Locked Safe: A Family Memoir

About the Book

This family memoir is my back story. A Locked Safe with 5 ‘Nazi’ passports was found after my mother died in 1996. My father had died 16 years earlier. Although we knew he was a German Jewish professional engineer fleeing Nazism in 1936, we did not know the details of how his family fled. The help of my mother’s family, the Leas, was essential. They had fled from pogroms in Ukraine/Russia in the late nineteenth century. Some were also caught up with Japanese internment camps in China, illustrating the diasporic nature of my family. My father, his elder brother and father were also interned by the British in 1940-1941. I look forward to not only my generation as the so-called second generation from the Holocaust, but also the third generation, specifically my daughter Charlotte Reiner Hershman. Although we tell a unique story of one family, that story of migration, seeking asylum or refuge and being exiled is a very frequent tale nowadays. In excavating my parents’ backgrounds and their influences on me and Charlotte, we show the long term psychological and social effects on our lives and possibly on future generations.

About the Author

Miriam E. David is professor emerita of sociology of education at University College London (UCL) Institute of Education (IOE). She has been a teacher, researcher, and head of department in various universities in England and the USA. Her research is on education, family, feminism, and gender. She edited (with Merilyn Moos) Debating the Zeitgeist and Being Second Generation (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2021). Charlotte Reiner is a graduate of the University of Cambridge in Modern and Medieval Languages. She also holds Masters’ degrees from the University of Durham and University College London. She is an experienced teacher and has taught in a range of both primary and secondary schools. She is currently working as a freelance private tutor for both schools and individual families.